


soon break, soon whither, soon forgotten

by WylderWolf



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, M/M, Oral Sex, PWP, Porn With Plot, Quadrant Confusion, quadrant flipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-25
Updated: 2015-06-25
Packaged: 2018-04-06 01:41:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4203153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WylderWolf/pseuds/WylderWolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>If all the world and love were young,</i><br/>And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,<br/>These pretty pleasures might me move,<br/>To live with thee, and be thy love.</p><p> </p><p>Dave thinks about his situation with Karkat. He agonizes. They both do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	soon break, soon whither, soon forgotten

You like it best when he fucks you like he hates you. You like the way his tongue curls at the base of your spine, teeth meeting skin where your shoulder fade into your neck and your voice vibrating around the both of you, warming his hands to the touch on your raised hips. He doesn’t make a sound. There’s no primal need playing into the way his fingernails rake down your back; it’s calculated and cruel holy shit, holy _shit_ is that everything you ever wanted or needed or palmed your own gross, discolored bulge for in the middle of the night.

He does this thing where his touches start sweet and turn _bad_ , moving a hand up your side until fingers bury themselves in your hair, giving an agonizingly gentle stroke to your scalp before he takes a fistful and pulls your head up with it so quickly that you’re seeing stars, your elbows almost failing you in their support. You don’t scream until he gives you an aching bite to the side of your throat and pairs it with the tip of his thumb brushing against the base of you oversensitive horn.

You’re shaking. You’re also muttering about how disgusting this is, how disgusting he is, how much you would love to die rather than be fucked by him like this, how much you would rather kill him, how much you _fucking hate him_ –

He responds with the sharp sting of his palm against your upper thigh and you _feel_ more than you _hear_ him hum at your startled gasp.

And you’re growling _fuck strider you piece of fucking shit you’re fucking horrible I wish you were dead I wish I was dead don’t you fucking know how to fuck your blackrom partner fucking more more more_ –

There are stars when he lets go of your hair to grasp your hip and shoulder and _god_ fucking damn it the leverage is good it’s so good and you want to tell him that but it comes out in the wordless noises you make and the saliva running from the corners of your mouth. Your vision goes blurry. You feel him come with a harsh shudder and then he’s collapsing on top of you, sweating, utterly still and silent and fuck fuck fuck _no_ , he can’t do that, you’re not _done_ , but he is, and you’re reduced to pleading _dave no please don’t stop please no please let me come please let me please_ —but he’s rolling to the side and moving to pull up his half-down god tier pants. He’s still over top of you, one elbow digging in between your shudder so you can’t move, and that _fucker_ is pulling up _your_ bared ass and _your_ still-dripping nook and you want to fucking cry so instead you scream. You scream at him.

Dave Strider leans down, knee trapping your aching lower back, to press a kiss to the bite mark just below your ear.

And then he’s gone.

And then you’re sobbing.

==>

You hate the way he sounds when you fuck him. You hate his voice and the desperation on his lips, but even more so you hate the way he tries to seduce you by hating himself. By rattling off his well-kept list of reasons to hate him. It makes you sick, especially when he presents them like prizes for you to chase after, like he wholeheartedly expects you to agree that his entire essence is pointless shit that you’d be better off eradicating.

So you fuck him to shut him up, and because he likes it, and because some part of you wants to prove him wrong, wrong, _wrong_ , prove that the taste of his skin doesn’t make you cringe. But it never makes him stop, not for long. He only proves his self-loathing in what he’s willing to do for you. In what he’s willing to let you do to him.

Your retaliation, at first, I to give him cruelty. This is when he starts making those _sounds_ , shoving his face down into the day’s surface—table, wall, sheets, your shoulder—and sounding like something is _wounding_ him, like you’re actually hurting him, until he demands more. This is when you start wondering who’s using who, here.

On the occasions that you see Gamzee, he looks ready to kill you. Kanaya noticeably avoids you. Terezi either doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, because for a while she’s the only one left talking to you after a month. You feel like shit. You also have no idea how to stop this. Not when he want it this badly, vocalizes this at almost every possible turn, makes you leave him feeling wrecked and guilty, guilty like you’re hurting him, guilty like you’re the scum of the earth—meteor—and that you need to be disposed of as much as he thinks he does.

It isn’t until Rose corners you and mentions that you’re a terrible kismesis that you start hating yourself.

You change tactics. You start proving him wrong.

Pressing him against the door almost as soon as he has it closed barely even takes him by surprise. He moves with you, faster than you’d like, more harsh than you’d like, setting a sickly taste in the back of your throat. He feels bitter. He feels like everything you hate and there is so much of you that wants to continue as you have been, until you remember his voice. Until your hand to his thigh elicits a sound that makes your stomach lurch.

Next, he is flush to your sheets, back arched, knees hooking around your shoulders, your mouth against him and his throat sending up a chorus of pleas for more that you are _determined_ not to respond to. Your tongue is caught in a tangle of slow ministrations orchestrated by the pressure of his claws against your scalp.

You begin in a pattern. Every time he asks— _demands_ —more, you slow your pace. His gasps bring on gentle touches, soft kisses, you moving up his torso, right to his chest, your mouth to his skin and your hands at his grubscars and he’s keening and you’re breaking so you kiss him , slow and sweet, and you feel him shudder. His claws are at your shoulder blades and it _hurts_ too much so you subside it with softness. You don’t do this. You don’t kiss him this way, with only the gentle open-close-open of your lips. You only part them when he relaxes.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Shh.” You curl a thumb up his hip and press you face so close to his that your eyelashes flutter against his cheekbone.

His eyes are wide when you pull away, his mouth slack and confused and something _too much_ pulls at your stomach. You look away from the shadows of his throat and the swollen pink of his lips and you focus solely on the trail your fingers make back down his stomach until you dip into him with their tips again and his back arches so perfectly that you _give up_ , you give up. You’re going slow enough that he’s mostly quiet, so you have to pay attention to the minute twitches of his now-closed eyelids to take your cues. 

You don’t want him to look up. He’ll see too much adoration.

He’s so warm when he reaches up to wrap an arm around your shoulder and pull himself closer, and there are more kisses, his bulge seeking you out and curling against you so that you gasp and you listen to him come while your face is pressed into his throat.

You hold him. He’s in your lap and you hold him.

He’s too stiff for you to be utterly confident and he eyes you like—like god no this is worse than his hatred because he’s looking at you like some foreign thing, like someone he doesn’t even _know_. He doesn’t look angry or confused he just looks _blank_ and you realize, distantly, how you must make him feel, sometimes.

You come with his lips around you and then he kicks you out without emotion. You sleep in disjointed fragments and the lingering taste of his skin.

==>

You feel violated.

You want to scrub his touches from you skin and forget his name smeared in red, want to yell at him, want to curl in on yourself until you’re nothing and don’t exist. Non-existent things don’t have to deal with this.

Kanaya tells you than a nonconsensual quadrant-flip is ground for a conversation, at the very least. Its one you don’t want to have.

You hate him so much and so tenderly that it almost makes you physically ill.

Flips aren’t uncommon, so long as they’re mutual and discussed and fully consented to, not sprung on perfectly good blackrom sex out of nowhere. You stay at your computer for a few days. Nothing really feels real and you hate him, hate, hate, hate, but everything is falling and you can’t wrap your being around how to handle it. You don’t even know exactly what’s falling. You only know that you need it to stop, or be done with, and _wow_ okay you _do_ need to talk to him about this but that thought makes your insides churn so violently that you wonder if you’ll vomit.

You think about his mouth. There’s a twinge of something warm at your core.

It takes being curled against Gamzee, with the deep hum of his voice radiating through his chest, telling you that you need to sort your shit out before you crumble and break under the kind of stress that not even the best moirail can fix, before you finally humor the idea. You have to wait until you aren’t angry with him. You also have to bully yourself into hating him properly for this conversation.

When you do talk to him, you can’t even yell. Not at first. It starts with you catching him, late at night, sitting cross-legged on the table and staring at the wall. He barely acknowledges your appearance, which okay yeah _that_ only serves to piss you off enough to do this. You rush him before you can react, throwing him to the floor without the slightest inkling that he may have _let_ you.

He says _what_ in the softest, most disinterested voice and it makes you _almost_ snap, _almost_ want to hit him and when you snarl out a _what the fuck do you mean, what_ , he just lays his head back against the floor and sighs. You want to scream. You want to kick him in the ribs. You drop to your knees beside him instead, kneeling by his shoulder, your eyes screwed up and glaring at the flatline of his mouth. He doesn’t respond when you tell him that the two of you need to talk. You take that as your cue to begin.

“You’re probably the _biggest_ asshole I’ve ever met,” you say, watching his face carefully for a reaction. He doesn’t so much as turn his face to look at you. “What I want to know is; how does _anyone_ get off pulling a quadrant flip like that? Don’t you realize how much that could fuck with someone’s pan? Or how much it could potentially hurt the relationship altogether?” You sniff, more than indignant. “How bad of a blackrom partner do you even have to be? Do I _seriously_ have to spoon-feed this bullshit to you humans, or continue to put myself on the line for the sake of your grub-esque hands-on learning?”

You don’t even notice that he’s laughing until you stop to listen. At least he has the decency to be quiet about it, his face scrunched up, all ugly pink skin, flat teeth bared, little heaving motions in his chest. It takes the fury a moment to reach your core, battling confusion and hurt for a lead position to your actions. By the time you open your mouth to yell at him, He’s already taking a breath to speak.

“…not your shitty kismesis, or whatever,” he says to the ceiling. “Never asked to be.”

Whatever he was trying to do, it stops you dead. You stare at him, openly, and watch him move to prop himself up on his elbows and look at you over the rims of his shades.

A sputter comes to your lips after a moment. “The fuck do you mean? Like, what the _actual fuck_ , Strider, because I’m pretty sure there are still welts on my ass that say you hate me.” You swallow, nervousness inevitably taking over for all other emotions before you can kick it out of the pilot’s seat. “Like—hate hate.”

 

He’s _still laughing_ , the fucker, and his movements don’t even look right. He’s too stiff. Too thoughtless. You almost jerk back when he grabs you hand with gentle fingers, scooting himself into a cross-legged sitting position in front of you. Curiosity forces you to let him splay out your digits with the pads of his thumbs, studying them in his lap a moment before bringing your palm to his face and—fuck—pressing it flat to his cheek. You see his eyes close behind his glasses.

You _do_ jerk away after a moment or processing. “What the absolute _shit_ —“ you rasp out, upper lip curling. “Did you not hear what I said, asshole? If you wanna flip red on me we have to talk about this shit first, _stop_ treating me like a matesprit, I haven’t told you whether I—“

He snaps at you. “And I never said I want to explore your weird quadrants system anyway.”

Silence. You can feel your pulse over your entire body. You can’t bring yourself to speak.

He sighs, slowly, like he’s gathering himself. “You do know humans don’t work that way, right?”

You say nothing. It takes another heavy pause before he manages to collect himself.

“We don’t have some fucked-up four-quadrant system to so much as show affection, y’know? We actually just let ourselves feel things without all the bullshit analyzation. We can wipe our asses without a the over-processing.”

He cuts you off when you try to interject.

“And we can manage more than one complex emotion at once without the implosion.”

Your breathing is hard. You want to yell—you know you hate him because _you want to yell_ , but there’s something so much _warmer_ crawling its way up through your stomach and your chest and—what the fuck, what the _fuck_ , you can’t tell if you’re flipping red or pale but it’s too much for you to handle. You feel his eyes on you. He’s waiting. You don’t respond.

“Karkat—“ he says on a choked sigh, and he slips off his shades and bows his head nearly into your lap, rubbing at the join between his eyes. “I’m sorry, okay? I can’t. I _can’t_.”

He waits again. You’re only staring at him, your expression some mix of disgust and confusion, one that makes him flinch like you’ve hit him when he sees it. His eyes are dry but so _tired_ and _sad_ that you look away like it hurts, like you’re staring into a bright light. His laugh is bitter, tinged-gray. You bite the inside of your cheek.

“Look— _please_ , okay, look—“ he rests his hands on your shoulder and shakes you gently, trying desperately to make eye contact. “Karkat. I _can’t_ work like that way but I _want_ to, alright?” He settles back again, clenching his jaw. “You’re an annoying fuck.”

You bristle.

“You drive me up the fucking wall, I usually want to push you buttons until you blow, but you also talk in your sleep and you actually visibly give a fuck about what happens to everyone here. It’s.” He bites his lip. “Confusing.”

“Stop.”

“I don’t want to be your kismesis,” he repeats, shaking his head slowly. “I don’t know what I wanna be, but it isn’t in any quadrant, okay?”

When you get up to leave, he doesn’t stop you, he doesn’t yell after you, and something deep in your chest shatters and flies into a thousand pieces and leaves you shaking against the door to your block, wide-eyed, thinking too hard.

==>

This is not how these things work. This is not how _you_ work. This is so far outside of your knowledge that it physically makes you sick and you are so, _so_ unsure of what to do but you’re doing it, you’re definitely doing it, whatever _it_  
is.

You’re… a little excited.

You are so, so terrified.

He’s sleeping when you enter his block. Dave Strider sleeps, recently, in a curled ball so tight that sometimes you think he must be hurting himself. Once, you noticed him drawing the hood of his cape up over his head as he settled, and when you asked he had been too tired not to answer, too relaxed not to tell you that he slept with his head covered so that the nightmares couldn’t reach him.

Remembering this now, as you’re looking at the knotted mass of him on the bed, it feels like a stab in the gut.

You move forward.

Your bare, thinly-padded feet make no sound against his floor, and he doesn’t stir until your weight hits the edge of the mattress. He makes a soft sound when you kneel beside him, unconsciously uncurling a fraction, moving toward your warmth. He sounds drunken, heavy, and you are so red and pale and dark and you feel too _full_ , full to _bursting_. You settle back against the pillows and watch as he unravels, moves into you, an arm around your torso and his head in the dip between your chest and shoulder. The fabric of his cape brushes the underside of your chin. You are breathless.

“Dave…” you murmur, more of an absent-minded sigh than a call to attention, but he makes a small, gentle sound in response.

“Are you awake?”

He shakes his head. You snort. Silence persists for a few moments, in which you feel the warmth of his breath on your sternum and it makes you jaw clench tight enough to hurt. You lean your head back and close your eyes, fingers plucking and twisting at his cape. His weight on you is comfortable and gentle and you let slip a long sigh.

“…I’m sorry, you jackass. There.”

Your voice doesn’t sound forceful enough. Mostly it sounds thick and tired.

There’s the slightest movement of his nose brushing your collar bone, a clumsy nuzzle, and you hear a rumble in his chest of him saying words, human words, luminous words, words reserved for unhealthy bullshit and your entire concept of romance is splitting before he even ends the phrase. You wonder if he’ll remember uttering it when he wakes.

You sort of hope he does.


End file.
